kaaos_af
1st August 2006, 07:41
This is a reprint of an amazing article I discovered and wish to reprint it for the benefit of the Red and Anarchist Action Network (RAAN) over in Venezuela and America. I have been in correspondance with Comrade Nachie, one of RAAN's co-founders, and must say that I find the RAAN's dismissal of Lenin extremely excessive (the poster of Marx executing Lenin for example). I have not (yet) seen a satisfactory argument against Lenin in any RAAN websites and feel that this needs to be addressed. There is still much to learn from Lenin, if not many of his modern followers in the Maoist, Trotskyist and Stalinist movements, and this report by Comrade Skellern addresses this well.
(((This isn't an attack on you, btw, Nachie- ;) Also, I mistakenly referred to Zizek as Zerzan in my message to you.))
O yeah- let's not turn this into a Kim Song Il versus Anarchist topic, yeah?
Normalising Lenin
Matt Skellern -
Prepared for Spectre, April 1 2003
"While the rejection of Leninism as we know it is absolutely necessary, I still can't treat Lenin as a dead dog. After all the fact is that more often than not the narratives of Anarchism and Feminism have fallen in the same patronising, moralist and elitist vanguardism that leninism has; and that is not a good reason to chuck them in the bin. You simply can't judge a dead man for the worms you find in his corpse. I am convinced you may find in Lenin the seeds of a totalitarian dictatorship, but you can also find the seeds of workers liberation. There is no contradiction in this. It is not enough to say Lenin was the creator of a horrific party machine that led to Stalinism without recognising the fact that his thought captured the imagination of millions of activists for decades and decades for a damn good reason. So the positions should be not how to avoid Leninist methods as if they were 'intrinsically evil', but ask ourselves what Leninism has to offer today to our struggles, what do we need from it that still remains relevant to the Left. The point is not to reject completely Lenin's ideas, but to make them work in a different way, transform them from a closed and totalising system of thought to an open and liberating one so that they do not become an obstacle to the struggle, but a weapon of it."
- Sergio Fiedler, 'New subjects; New Alliances', June 1998
When I first got involved in activism, I couldn't understand why two of the dominant groups on the Australian left looked to Lenin and Russia for inspiration. Surely there were other, more inspiring, less authoritarian, examples to draw from in history. And there are- Spain, 1968, the Zapatistas, etc- and they are deserving of greater attention, but for better or worse we are also still stuck with Lenin, a historical figure rendered perpetually incomprehensible by the shallowness of the left's engagement with him. Either you are with him or you are against him- anarchists and autonomists put Lenin on trial at their conferences, whilst the various post-Trotskyist groups still refuse to entertain any suggestion of fallacy on Lenin's part. This paper is an attempt to bring together some of the more interesting observations I have encountered about Lenin and his tradition.
The Leninist Moment, 1917: intervention and the collective subject
What I like most about Zizek's take on Lenin is the centrality of intervention- the way that a self-conscious collective subject (ie, the party) is capable of intervening into the class struggle to change the existing state of affairs, and therefore history. This active approach to making history is what makes the party central to Lenin's thinking- it immediately poses the need to forge a collective agent of historical change. Zizek argues that Lenin's realisation after February 1917 was that the Bolsheviks, as a 'collective social actor', were capable of bringing a 'premature' situation to 'maturity' through action:"the Leninist stance was to take a leap... seizing the opportunity and intervening, even if the situation was 'premature', with a wager that this very 'premature' intervention will radically change the 'objective' relationship of forces itself, within which the initial situation appeared as 'premature'..."
This is a fairly uncontroversial narrative of the way that Lenin's motto in April 1917 ('carpe diem') differs from Second International Marxism, Kautskyism, Plekanhovism and other variants of evolutionary socialism. But it is more than that- arguably, this 'Leninist moment' is the practical realisation of the essence of dialectical materialism. For Lukács, the defining feature of dialectical materialism vis-ŕ-vis bourgeois philosophy was the latter's "failure to recognise that in all metaphysics the object remains untouched and unaltered so that thought remains contemplative and fails to become practical; while for the dialectical method the central problem is to change reality."
Is this not what Zizek's Lenin does?- he changes reality by making thought practical. Again this is not too controversial. What is more interesting is a consideration of how this relates to What is to be Done?, to the thought of Rosa Luxemburg, and to the practice of the revolutionary left in Australia today.
Criticism of What is to be Done? - towards a post-modern Leninism?
What is to be Done?, published in 1902, is one of Lenin's earlier great works, in which he argues for the first time (?) for a centralised revolutionary party, and in which he makes the infamous claim that workers are incapable of rising beyond trade union (ie reformist) consciousness of their own efforts, and that they need the bourgeois intelligentsia, organised through the party, to bring them revolutionary consciousness 'from without': "Class political consciousness can be brought to the workers only from without, that is, only from outside of the economic struggle, from outside of the sphere of relations between workers and employers. (p98, Beijing edition)"
Following Tony Cliff, the International Socialist tendency has argued, credibly in my view, that Lenin's views about the possibility of workers spontaneously achieving revolutionary consciousness changed fundamentally after the 1905 revolution, in which he saw workers taking up revolutionary ideas on a mass scale despite having no contact with organised revolutionary groups.
Relativising Lenin
Cliff's argument is an important corrective to those who would set up a straw Lenin to argue against, but it is not entirely adequate. In truth, there is something about Lenin's claim, which is the dominating theme of WITBD, that is central to his whole thinking. What Lenin does in WITBD is arrogate exclusively to the Party the ability to do what is described above- namely, to change the course of history by a collective intervention into the existing state of affairs. He takes was is in reality the ability of any subjective agent- to change history- and places it solely in the hands of Party. In this respect, we might be tempted to call for a 'post-modern Leninism'- one which identifies the way that a collective subject can change the coordinates of struggle through a conscious intervention, and which fights for the creation of such a collective subject, but which also recognises that no organisation can claim exclusive right to this ability, and that in fact many aspiring vanguards will be doing the same thing at the same time. As people sometimes said in Left Alliance, 'we are for a party, but not the Party'.
Why is this important? Because by relativising and moderating Lenin's fundamental claim in WITBD, we can firstly identify more clearly the importance and usefulness of his argument. Secondly, we can identify where he went wrong, and consider the effects that this had on Lenin's practice and his attempts to bring a socialist society into being.
Firstly, it should be kept in mind what Lenin was arguing against in WITBD: Economism, the idea that workers would spontaneously achieve revolutionary consciousness through engaging in limited economic and trade union struggles.
In response to such arguments, surely rather than making grandiose, authoritarian and easily falsifiable claims about the inherent 'inability' of workers to do this or that, it would be more appropriate to make the more modest observation that revolutionaries assisting this process of consciousness-development through discussion and activity could only be of assistance? This much more limited claim is the core strength of Leninism- the idea that what we need to establish is not a perfect description of the state of struggle, nor an identification of how things 'ought to be', but rather what we can do as a collective body of self-conscious revolutionaries to take the movement forward.
This reading of WITBD is important for a second reason, however, because it also enables an identification of where Lenin got it wrong. As previously discussed, his mistake was to claim exclusive rights over the conferral of revolutionary consciousness to one collective subject- namely, The Party. And despite Tony Cliff's creditable attempt to distinguish 'good Lenin' from 'bad Lenin', it is easy to see how this slippage pervades Lenin's entire oeuvre, and that of his followers. This can be seen with reference to two areas- the notion of spontaneity, and the role of the party in history.
Spontaneity and Subjectivity
Firstly, WITBD is full of venomous references to the need to 'combat spontaneity'. But spontaneity is a misleading concept, as it implies a subjective viewpoint- spontaneous from whose point of view? The answer is obvious- when
Lenin speaks of spontaneity, he means in relation to the party- the idea that we should look at things from the point of view of the workers who initiated the 'spontaneous' action is totally absent. Yet a relativisation Lenin's argument against spontaneity would shed a whole new light on his point- perhaps the point is not to combat spontaneity per se, but rather to combat bowing before spontaneity, before the tendency for spontaneity-worshipping to paralyse conscious action. This transforms a thoroughly objectionable aspect of Lenin's thought into an acutely observant one. But it also suggests a potential source of the early degeneration of Lenin's socialism-building project; if he treated every spontaneous action by workers as suspect and in need of 'combatting', then it is little wonder that he was unable to harness the creative energies of the Russian people to build a post-capitalist society.
XXXX quote from Marx and Beyond
The Party and History
Secondly, WITBD's arrogation to the party of sole rights to conscious activity arguably laid the basis for the horribly distorted notions about the 'historical necessity of the party' that all of the trotskyist left still cling to today. Along with the 'inevitability of socialism', there is nothing more in need of total rejection more than the idea that 'we' 'need' 'the' party (ie our particular brand of sectarian leninism) to make a revolution today. It is not that these claims are untrue, but rather that they are totally useless and in fact very harmful to any attempt to understand how to take action to change the world, serving only to legitimate sectarian party building routines, to destroy the lives of well meaning revolutionaries, and to perpetuate the pathological delusion held by many people in trotskyist sects that they are the future vanguard of the working class. The only useful question to ask is: how can we build the struggle in the here and now?
Rosa Luxemburg: the anti-Lenin
Zizek's articulation of the subject-object nexus in history- the notion of intervention to change the existing coordinates of struggle- may sound obvious to the point of lacking any content. What is remarkable however is the extent to which this point, so essential to Lenin's life and work, is not practiced by large sections of the revolutionary left. Consider the trotskyist sects we encounter today full of ideas about what the movement 'needs' to be doing, completely divorced from any conception of how to put this into practice (eg 'the anti-war movement must take up the issue of imperialism/ Palestine/ civil disobedience/ etc' - but how?), or the autonomists who see the question 'What can we do to further the struggle'? as a violation of the autonomy of the movement.
Historically, Rosa Luxemburg stands out as the anti-Lenin, a figure opposed to his logic, and some consideration of her thought can therefore highlight Lenin's strengths and weaknesses. For what is lacking in Rosa Luxemburg's thought is a successful conception of how conscious revolutionaries could collectively take action to build a force capable of revolutionary change (nothing controversial here). Rather than, like Lenin, leading the class though action, Luxemburg stood alongside the class until the end. As Lukács writes, "Her death at the hands of her bitterest enemies, Noske and Scheidemann, is, logically, the crowning pinnacle of her thought and life. Theoretically she had predicted the defeat of the January rising years before it took place; tactically she foresaw it at the moment of action. Yet she remained consistently on the side of the masses and shared their fate. That is to say, the unity of theory and practice was preserved in her actions with exactly the same consistency and with exactly the same logic as that which earned her the enmity of her murderers: the opportunists of Social Democracy."
Rosa Luxemburg was opposed to the insurrection during which she was killed, and could in a 'Leninist moment' have taken action to prevent its occurrence. But she did not- she took part in the insurrection out of an exceptionally clear understanding that mass instruction in revolutionary theory and strategy could only come about through experience. Like Gramsci, Luxemburg had an extraordinary appreciation of the need to draw the masses alongside the vanguard at decisive moments- hence her support for mass democracy and learning through experience, and her opposition to substitutionism. She articulated the inability of the vanguard to substitute itself for the mass movement in thought or practice with the brilliant claim, directed at Lenin, that 'historically, the errors committed by a truly revolutionary movement are infinitely more fruitful than the infallibility of the cleverest central committee'.
Where do we see these ideas in Lenin? They are simply non-existent. When Lenin cautioned revolutionaries against premature action (eg in Germany), the advice was purely practical- he saw the challenge as being to whip the masses into shape, to the point where they would be capable of taking orders from above. This may sound like crude anti-Leninism, but I have searched in vain in Lenin for any understanding of the need for self-activity such as we find in Luxemburg. There is nothing- the Party plays a directive role while the masses obey. Any number of quotations would demonstrate my meaning, but the introduction to Part VI of Left Wing Communism: an Infantile Disorder is a particularly vicious articulation of Lenin's thinking on this matter, that ruins an otherwise excellent pamphlet. In fact, it is quite easy to trace the increasing predominance of authoritarian conceptions of political leadership within Lenin's work after 1917.
What is the point of this? In short, it would appear that Lenin and Luxemburg's thoughts on party and class were the dialectical opposite of the other. Lenin understood clearly the potential for conscious revolutionaries to collectively
intervene into the class struggle to change the course of history, but lacked a deep understanding of the need for selfactivity, learning through experience, etc (except insofar as they fulfilled his own functional needs). Luxemburg, on the other hand, deeply appreciated the need for people to develop their ideas through action and self-activity, but lacked any conception of how to actualise these ideas in practice. In other words- Lenin could think from the point of view of the party but not of the class, whereas Luxemburg's natural subjectivity was that of the class, with little ability to see things from the point of view of the needs of conscious revolutionaries. Both points of view must therefore be seen as incomplete.
The Leninist Moment, 1914: repeating Lenin
Another important aspect of the Leninist moment articulated by Zizek was the Lenin faced with the capitulation of European Social Democracy to nationalism at the outbreak of World War One "The Lenin we want to retrieve is the Lenin-in-becoming, the Lenin whose fundamental experience was that of being thrown into a catastrophic new constellation in which old coordinates proved useless, and who was thus compelled to reinvent Marxism- recall his acerb remark apropos of some new problem: 'About this, Marx said not a word'. The idea is not to return to Lenin, but to REPEAT him in the Kierkegaardian sense: to retrieve the same impulse in today's constellation... What Lenin did for 1914, we should do for 1990.
In other words, the Australian left today needs an independent, original, creative and constructive engagement with the point of struggle we find ourselves at. Until now, the revolutionary left- with the exception of a brief glimmer of hope from the ISO after S11 2000- has been incapable of doing this. It has never been clearer that the organised left does not have the answers, does not have any new ideas or inspiration- an important role for Spectre must be to create the conditions for such a renaissance of ideas and action on the Australian left. Almost by definition we cannot 'do' this ourselves, but simply recognising its importance would be a step forward. As Sergio writes, "The task is to shed the invisible uniform the traditional leftists wear in their minds, languages and behaviour. Our creativity to reach people is far more greater to be limited by traditional party mechanisms. We must perpetually reinvent our means, rather than be entrapped by the deadly repetition of the same old catechism: 'this is the way our tradition has always done it'.
Or, as Zizek writes,
"Consequently, to REPEAT Lenin does NOT mean a RETURN to Lenin- to repeat Lenin is to accept that 'Lenin is dead', that his particular solution failed, even failed monstrously, but that there was a utopian spark in it worth saving. To repeat Lenin means that one has to distinguish between what Lenin effectively did and the field of possibilities that he opened up, the tension in Lenin between what he effectively did and another dimension, what was 'in Lenin more than Lenin himself'. To repeat Lenin is to repeat not what Lenin DID, but what he FAILED TO DO, his MISSED opportunities."
Anti-Capitalism: organisational form of the social proletariat?
In 'New Subjects; New Alliances', Sergio gives a very convincing narrative about the way that Lenin based the form of organisation of his revolutionary vanguard party on the composition of the Russian proletariat- the skilled factory hand or 'professional worker'. To be a Leninist today, he therefore argues, is to seek organisational forms for struggle that based on the diverse and multi-faceted 'social proletariat' that exists under neo-liberalism. Since productive activity has diffused throughout the whole of society under neo-liberalism (articulated in the notion of the 'social factory'), and become decentralised as capital seeks to break the collective power of the mass proletariat organised in the factories, so too must our organisational forms become decentralised, horizontal and multiplicitous. We need a "recognition of the need for a new type of revolutionary practice that corresponds to the existing composition of the working class"
This summary hardly does Sergio's argument justice. There are only two things I want to note briefly. Firstly, Sergio's paper was written in 1998, but could be seen in many ways to presage the development of anti-capitalism, with its focus on decentralisation and autonomy. Is it legitimate, therefore, to see the anti-capitalist movement as an expression of the organisational form of the new social proletariat that has come into being since the advent of neo liberalism?
Secondly, Sergio argues that this new composition of the working class necessitates a rejection of the habit of 'reducing the diversity of social movements to a single leadership and political line', a recognition that there is 'no universal narrative of revolution... only a plurality of proletarian resistances., etc etc. There is much in this that is creditable, however I would argue that Sergio neglects one point: that the importance of a level of political unity is not a historical product of the professional proletariat of the early 20th century, but rather supra-historical. Why? Because theory is not abstract- rather, it finds material articulation in our practice, and therefore striving for a level of agreement in theory is a necessary component of a meaningful, collective revolutionary praxis. This is not to imply any particular form by which this political unity might be realised, but simply to note that any new revolutionary practice cannot abandon attempts at theoretical unity and clarity (what might be termed 'centralism') for the warm waters of post-modern relativism.
The revolutionary left in Australia
This section is one of the most important, but I have run out of time to do it justice. The point of the above thoughts is that they have a critical bearing on the practice of the revolutionary left in Australia. For me a source of interest in Zizek's notion of the 'Leninist moment' is the way that it is so antithetical to the practice of much of the autonomist and anarchist left in Australia. They are prepared to take action on their own, but intervening into an existing struggle is generally seen as either a futile foray into reformist mass politics or as a violation of the autonomy of that movement. This reached its absurd height during last November's WTO protests, in which there were numerous artificially created 'blocks' who all guarded their autonomy very fiercely, but very few of which actually took their politics beyond their own immediate networks. The idea of 'organising where you are located', despite being a positive antidote to grandiose ISO organising drives that are far beyond the abilities of the organisation, seems to discourage the risk associated with intervening to change the existing state of affairs.
The lack of a Leninist impulse is nowhere more evident than in the history of Love and Rage as an organisation. In my limited experience of the group's last couple of years, what was crucially lacking was an understanding of how the organisation might act collectively to intervene into the struggles in which the membership were involved- precisely the challenge that has been discussed in this paper. Love and Rage's reluctance to provide political leadership in campaigns manifested not only in a lack of collective intervention, but also in a style of campaigning that aimed to unify people at the lowest possible level Ieg the Log of Claims campaigns). The need for this Leninist impulse was crucial to the disintegration of Love and Rage, with Sergio writing in his resignation letter (dated 27 Nov 2001), that 'to accept the inevitability of the leninist moment is to accept the need for political intervention.'
Who on the Australian left, then, is taking up Lenin's challenge of intervening, 'even if the situation was 'premature', with a wager that this very 'premature' intervention will radically change the 'objective' relationship of forces itself, within which the initial situation appeared as 'premature' '? Interestingly enough, the only group that comes to mind is Melbourne's autonomist-inspired No One is Illegal, who in initiating last year's Woomera action took a leap, unafraid of success, and won. Interestingly enough, NOII has been at times a kind of radical leadership or vanguard of the refugee movement, but their leadership has been in the form of 'leading by example' rather than the conventional Leninist sense. Thus it would appear that the idea of a 'Leninist moment', if not Leninism itself, continues to have relevance on the Australian left today.
Conclusions for practice
What conclusions can we draw from these reflections for the reconstruction of a revolutionary practice in Australia?
1- We need a revolutionary organisation of some kind to be the self-conscious collective subject capable of enacting the Leninist moment articulated by Zizek
2- This organisation cannot simply be a catch all or talk shop for revolutionaries, but rather must strive for a level of political unity, because theory is not abstract but rather something that finds material articulation through practice. This does not mean enforcing political homogeneity or much less a unanimity of campaign activity, but simply a recognition of the theory-practice nexus and the consequent need for continuous political debate and engagement to raise the level of theorisation and agreement.
3- For some time to come in Australia, it is not viable or desirable for any new revolutionary project to enforce unanimity in the practice of its participants. The fact that organisations like Socialist Alternative and the International Socialist Organisation 'centralise' their resources around the campaign of the week only demonstrate their deracination from any meaningful community of struggle. Our role in bringing together a new revolutionary movement in Australia must be to find people where they exist, and to unify them politically rather than enforcing a unanimity of practice. Note that this reverses the orthodox trotskyist notion of the united front (agreement on practical issues, disagreement on theoretical issues).
4- In order to learn from Lenin, we need to historicise his work- understand, for example, the way that the composition of the imperial Russian working class affected his conception of the party, or the way that the clandestine conditions of Tzarism limited the capacity for internal democracy in the party, or the way that Lenin's theory of imperialism was specific to a historical period that has long since passed. In doing this, we could do a lot worse than look to Tony Cliff, the founder of the International Socialist tendency, who in the 1950s developed a number of ingenious and highly innovative theories to bring trotskyism up to date and to develop a consistent understanding of the world- state capitalism, deflected permanent revolution, a materialist analysis of reformism, the permanent arms economy, socialism from below, etc. Whilst it may be claimed that he underwent his 'Leninist
moment' in the 1950s, unfortunately since then his new ideas, in the hands of Harman, Callinicos and numerous lesser lights, have fossilised into a series of universally applicable, de-historicised theories with no meaningful relationship to the real world.
5- We need to abandon the 'defend/ condemn Lenin and all his works' style of argument, in recognition that Lenin was a great revolutionary but that he also got things wrong, 'even monstrously so'. We need to develop a relationship with Lenin much like that we have with Lukács or Gramsci- for whom referring to them does not necessarily imply uncritical agreement on all points; quoting Gramsci does not make you a 'Gramsciist'
6- We need to abandon any justification for the party on the basis of a historically or teleologically ordained role. The party must be able to justify its existence with reference to the assistance it gives to today's struggles. Any other kind of justification is a sure sign of sectarianism. This is a difficult point to accept for most people in trotskyist organisations, since they have been trained either to justify their movement work in terms of the benefit it brings to the party (rather than the other way around as I am demanding), or alternatively (in the case of the ISO) they have been encouraged to become schizophrenics, drawing a dichotomy between the two separate, self-justifying spheres of 'party work' and 'movement work'.
J Matt Skellern
1
On using this quote I am struck by the gendered nature of my characterisation of Lenin and Luxemburg- Lenin the actor and creator in history, Luxemburg the passive companion-figure to the masses. I am not sure what to make of this, except to observe that everything being said about Lenin and Luxemburg at this point is more at the level of ideal-types than accurate historical figures.
(((This isn't an attack on you, btw, Nachie- ;) Also, I mistakenly referred to Zizek as Zerzan in my message to you.))
O yeah- let's not turn this into a Kim Song Il versus Anarchist topic, yeah?
Normalising Lenin
Matt Skellern -
Prepared for Spectre, April 1 2003
"While the rejection of Leninism as we know it is absolutely necessary, I still can't treat Lenin as a dead dog. After all the fact is that more often than not the narratives of Anarchism and Feminism have fallen in the same patronising, moralist and elitist vanguardism that leninism has; and that is not a good reason to chuck them in the bin. You simply can't judge a dead man for the worms you find in his corpse. I am convinced you may find in Lenin the seeds of a totalitarian dictatorship, but you can also find the seeds of workers liberation. There is no contradiction in this. It is not enough to say Lenin was the creator of a horrific party machine that led to Stalinism without recognising the fact that his thought captured the imagination of millions of activists for decades and decades for a damn good reason. So the positions should be not how to avoid Leninist methods as if they were 'intrinsically evil', but ask ourselves what Leninism has to offer today to our struggles, what do we need from it that still remains relevant to the Left. The point is not to reject completely Lenin's ideas, but to make them work in a different way, transform them from a closed and totalising system of thought to an open and liberating one so that they do not become an obstacle to the struggle, but a weapon of it."
- Sergio Fiedler, 'New subjects; New Alliances', June 1998
When I first got involved in activism, I couldn't understand why two of the dominant groups on the Australian left looked to Lenin and Russia for inspiration. Surely there were other, more inspiring, less authoritarian, examples to draw from in history. And there are- Spain, 1968, the Zapatistas, etc- and they are deserving of greater attention, but for better or worse we are also still stuck with Lenin, a historical figure rendered perpetually incomprehensible by the shallowness of the left's engagement with him. Either you are with him or you are against him- anarchists and autonomists put Lenin on trial at their conferences, whilst the various post-Trotskyist groups still refuse to entertain any suggestion of fallacy on Lenin's part. This paper is an attempt to bring together some of the more interesting observations I have encountered about Lenin and his tradition.
The Leninist Moment, 1917: intervention and the collective subject
What I like most about Zizek's take on Lenin is the centrality of intervention- the way that a self-conscious collective subject (ie, the party) is capable of intervening into the class struggle to change the existing state of affairs, and therefore history. This active approach to making history is what makes the party central to Lenin's thinking- it immediately poses the need to forge a collective agent of historical change. Zizek argues that Lenin's realisation after February 1917 was that the Bolsheviks, as a 'collective social actor', were capable of bringing a 'premature' situation to 'maturity' through action:"the Leninist stance was to take a leap... seizing the opportunity and intervening, even if the situation was 'premature', with a wager that this very 'premature' intervention will radically change the 'objective' relationship of forces itself, within which the initial situation appeared as 'premature'..."
This is a fairly uncontroversial narrative of the way that Lenin's motto in April 1917 ('carpe diem') differs from Second International Marxism, Kautskyism, Plekanhovism and other variants of evolutionary socialism. But it is more than that- arguably, this 'Leninist moment' is the practical realisation of the essence of dialectical materialism. For Lukács, the defining feature of dialectical materialism vis-ŕ-vis bourgeois philosophy was the latter's "failure to recognise that in all metaphysics the object remains untouched and unaltered so that thought remains contemplative and fails to become practical; while for the dialectical method the central problem is to change reality."
Is this not what Zizek's Lenin does?- he changes reality by making thought practical. Again this is not too controversial. What is more interesting is a consideration of how this relates to What is to be Done?, to the thought of Rosa Luxemburg, and to the practice of the revolutionary left in Australia today.
Criticism of What is to be Done? - towards a post-modern Leninism?
What is to be Done?, published in 1902, is one of Lenin's earlier great works, in which he argues for the first time (?) for a centralised revolutionary party, and in which he makes the infamous claim that workers are incapable of rising beyond trade union (ie reformist) consciousness of their own efforts, and that they need the bourgeois intelligentsia, organised through the party, to bring them revolutionary consciousness 'from without': "Class political consciousness can be brought to the workers only from without, that is, only from outside of the economic struggle, from outside of the sphere of relations between workers and employers. (p98, Beijing edition)"
Following Tony Cliff, the International Socialist tendency has argued, credibly in my view, that Lenin's views about the possibility of workers spontaneously achieving revolutionary consciousness changed fundamentally after the 1905 revolution, in which he saw workers taking up revolutionary ideas on a mass scale despite having no contact with organised revolutionary groups.
Relativising Lenin
Cliff's argument is an important corrective to those who would set up a straw Lenin to argue against, but it is not entirely adequate. In truth, there is something about Lenin's claim, which is the dominating theme of WITBD, that is central to his whole thinking. What Lenin does in WITBD is arrogate exclusively to the Party the ability to do what is described above- namely, to change the course of history by a collective intervention into the existing state of affairs. He takes was is in reality the ability of any subjective agent- to change history- and places it solely in the hands of Party. In this respect, we might be tempted to call for a 'post-modern Leninism'- one which identifies the way that a collective subject can change the coordinates of struggle through a conscious intervention, and which fights for the creation of such a collective subject, but which also recognises that no organisation can claim exclusive right to this ability, and that in fact many aspiring vanguards will be doing the same thing at the same time. As people sometimes said in Left Alliance, 'we are for a party, but not the Party'.
Why is this important? Because by relativising and moderating Lenin's fundamental claim in WITBD, we can firstly identify more clearly the importance and usefulness of his argument. Secondly, we can identify where he went wrong, and consider the effects that this had on Lenin's practice and his attempts to bring a socialist society into being.
Firstly, it should be kept in mind what Lenin was arguing against in WITBD: Economism, the idea that workers would spontaneously achieve revolutionary consciousness through engaging in limited economic and trade union struggles.
In response to such arguments, surely rather than making grandiose, authoritarian and easily falsifiable claims about the inherent 'inability' of workers to do this or that, it would be more appropriate to make the more modest observation that revolutionaries assisting this process of consciousness-development through discussion and activity could only be of assistance? This much more limited claim is the core strength of Leninism- the idea that what we need to establish is not a perfect description of the state of struggle, nor an identification of how things 'ought to be', but rather what we can do as a collective body of self-conscious revolutionaries to take the movement forward.
This reading of WITBD is important for a second reason, however, because it also enables an identification of where Lenin got it wrong. As previously discussed, his mistake was to claim exclusive rights over the conferral of revolutionary consciousness to one collective subject- namely, The Party. And despite Tony Cliff's creditable attempt to distinguish 'good Lenin' from 'bad Lenin', it is easy to see how this slippage pervades Lenin's entire oeuvre, and that of his followers. This can be seen with reference to two areas- the notion of spontaneity, and the role of the party in history.
Spontaneity and Subjectivity
Firstly, WITBD is full of venomous references to the need to 'combat spontaneity'. But spontaneity is a misleading concept, as it implies a subjective viewpoint- spontaneous from whose point of view? The answer is obvious- when
Lenin speaks of spontaneity, he means in relation to the party- the idea that we should look at things from the point of view of the workers who initiated the 'spontaneous' action is totally absent. Yet a relativisation Lenin's argument against spontaneity would shed a whole new light on his point- perhaps the point is not to combat spontaneity per se, but rather to combat bowing before spontaneity, before the tendency for spontaneity-worshipping to paralyse conscious action. This transforms a thoroughly objectionable aspect of Lenin's thought into an acutely observant one. But it also suggests a potential source of the early degeneration of Lenin's socialism-building project; if he treated every spontaneous action by workers as suspect and in need of 'combatting', then it is little wonder that he was unable to harness the creative energies of the Russian people to build a post-capitalist society.
XXXX quote from Marx and Beyond
The Party and History
Secondly, WITBD's arrogation to the party of sole rights to conscious activity arguably laid the basis for the horribly distorted notions about the 'historical necessity of the party' that all of the trotskyist left still cling to today. Along with the 'inevitability of socialism', there is nothing more in need of total rejection more than the idea that 'we' 'need' 'the' party (ie our particular brand of sectarian leninism) to make a revolution today. It is not that these claims are untrue, but rather that they are totally useless and in fact very harmful to any attempt to understand how to take action to change the world, serving only to legitimate sectarian party building routines, to destroy the lives of well meaning revolutionaries, and to perpetuate the pathological delusion held by many people in trotskyist sects that they are the future vanguard of the working class. The only useful question to ask is: how can we build the struggle in the here and now?
Rosa Luxemburg: the anti-Lenin
Zizek's articulation of the subject-object nexus in history- the notion of intervention to change the existing coordinates of struggle- may sound obvious to the point of lacking any content. What is remarkable however is the extent to which this point, so essential to Lenin's life and work, is not practiced by large sections of the revolutionary left. Consider the trotskyist sects we encounter today full of ideas about what the movement 'needs' to be doing, completely divorced from any conception of how to put this into practice (eg 'the anti-war movement must take up the issue of imperialism/ Palestine/ civil disobedience/ etc' - but how?), or the autonomists who see the question 'What can we do to further the struggle'? as a violation of the autonomy of the movement.
Historically, Rosa Luxemburg stands out as the anti-Lenin, a figure opposed to his logic, and some consideration of her thought can therefore highlight Lenin's strengths and weaknesses. For what is lacking in Rosa Luxemburg's thought is a successful conception of how conscious revolutionaries could collectively take action to build a force capable of revolutionary change (nothing controversial here). Rather than, like Lenin, leading the class though action, Luxemburg stood alongside the class until the end. As Lukács writes, "Her death at the hands of her bitterest enemies, Noske and Scheidemann, is, logically, the crowning pinnacle of her thought and life. Theoretically she had predicted the defeat of the January rising years before it took place; tactically she foresaw it at the moment of action. Yet she remained consistently on the side of the masses and shared their fate. That is to say, the unity of theory and practice was preserved in her actions with exactly the same consistency and with exactly the same logic as that which earned her the enmity of her murderers: the opportunists of Social Democracy."
Rosa Luxemburg was opposed to the insurrection during which she was killed, and could in a 'Leninist moment' have taken action to prevent its occurrence. But she did not- she took part in the insurrection out of an exceptionally clear understanding that mass instruction in revolutionary theory and strategy could only come about through experience. Like Gramsci, Luxemburg had an extraordinary appreciation of the need to draw the masses alongside the vanguard at decisive moments- hence her support for mass democracy and learning through experience, and her opposition to substitutionism. She articulated the inability of the vanguard to substitute itself for the mass movement in thought or practice with the brilliant claim, directed at Lenin, that 'historically, the errors committed by a truly revolutionary movement are infinitely more fruitful than the infallibility of the cleverest central committee'.
Where do we see these ideas in Lenin? They are simply non-existent. When Lenin cautioned revolutionaries against premature action (eg in Germany), the advice was purely practical- he saw the challenge as being to whip the masses into shape, to the point where they would be capable of taking orders from above. This may sound like crude anti-Leninism, but I have searched in vain in Lenin for any understanding of the need for self-activity such as we find in Luxemburg. There is nothing- the Party plays a directive role while the masses obey. Any number of quotations would demonstrate my meaning, but the introduction to Part VI of Left Wing Communism: an Infantile Disorder is a particularly vicious articulation of Lenin's thinking on this matter, that ruins an otherwise excellent pamphlet. In fact, it is quite easy to trace the increasing predominance of authoritarian conceptions of political leadership within Lenin's work after 1917.
What is the point of this? In short, it would appear that Lenin and Luxemburg's thoughts on party and class were the dialectical opposite of the other. Lenin understood clearly the potential for conscious revolutionaries to collectively
intervene into the class struggle to change the course of history, but lacked a deep understanding of the need for selfactivity, learning through experience, etc (except insofar as they fulfilled his own functional needs). Luxemburg, on the other hand, deeply appreciated the need for people to develop their ideas through action and self-activity, but lacked any conception of how to actualise these ideas in practice. In other words- Lenin could think from the point of view of the party but not of the class, whereas Luxemburg's natural subjectivity was that of the class, with little ability to see things from the point of view of the needs of conscious revolutionaries. Both points of view must therefore be seen as incomplete.
The Leninist Moment, 1914: repeating Lenin
Another important aspect of the Leninist moment articulated by Zizek was the Lenin faced with the capitulation of European Social Democracy to nationalism at the outbreak of World War One "The Lenin we want to retrieve is the Lenin-in-becoming, the Lenin whose fundamental experience was that of being thrown into a catastrophic new constellation in which old coordinates proved useless, and who was thus compelled to reinvent Marxism- recall his acerb remark apropos of some new problem: 'About this, Marx said not a word'. The idea is not to return to Lenin, but to REPEAT him in the Kierkegaardian sense: to retrieve the same impulse in today's constellation... What Lenin did for 1914, we should do for 1990.
In other words, the Australian left today needs an independent, original, creative and constructive engagement with the point of struggle we find ourselves at. Until now, the revolutionary left- with the exception of a brief glimmer of hope from the ISO after S11 2000- has been incapable of doing this. It has never been clearer that the organised left does not have the answers, does not have any new ideas or inspiration- an important role for Spectre must be to create the conditions for such a renaissance of ideas and action on the Australian left. Almost by definition we cannot 'do' this ourselves, but simply recognising its importance would be a step forward. As Sergio writes, "The task is to shed the invisible uniform the traditional leftists wear in their minds, languages and behaviour. Our creativity to reach people is far more greater to be limited by traditional party mechanisms. We must perpetually reinvent our means, rather than be entrapped by the deadly repetition of the same old catechism: 'this is the way our tradition has always done it'.
Or, as Zizek writes,
"Consequently, to REPEAT Lenin does NOT mean a RETURN to Lenin- to repeat Lenin is to accept that 'Lenin is dead', that his particular solution failed, even failed monstrously, but that there was a utopian spark in it worth saving. To repeat Lenin means that one has to distinguish between what Lenin effectively did and the field of possibilities that he opened up, the tension in Lenin between what he effectively did and another dimension, what was 'in Lenin more than Lenin himself'. To repeat Lenin is to repeat not what Lenin DID, but what he FAILED TO DO, his MISSED opportunities."
Anti-Capitalism: organisational form of the social proletariat?
In 'New Subjects; New Alliances', Sergio gives a very convincing narrative about the way that Lenin based the form of organisation of his revolutionary vanguard party on the composition of the Russian proletariat- the skilled factory hand or 'professional worker'. To be a Leninist today, he therefore argues, is to seek organisational forms for struggle that based on the diverse and multi-faceted 'social proletariat' that exists under neo-liberalism. Since productive activity has diffused throughout the whole of society under neo-liberalism (articulated in the notion of the 'social factory'), and become decentralised as capital seeks to break the collective power of the mass proletariat organised in the factories, so too must our organisational forms become decentralised, horizontal and multiplicitous. We need a "recognition of the need for a new type of revolutionary practice that corresponds to the existing composition of the working class"
This summary hardly does Sergio's argument justice. There are only two things I want to note briefly. Firstly, Sergio's paper was written in 1998, but could be seen in many ways to presage the development of anti-capitalism, with its focus on decentralisation and autonomy. Is it legitimate, therefore, to see the anti-capitalist movement as an expression of the organisational form of the new social proletariat that has come into being since the advent of neo liberalism?
Secondly, Sergio argues that this new composition of the working class necessitates a rejection of the habit of 'reducing the diversity of social movements to a single leadership and political line', a recognition that there is 'no universal narrative of revolution... only a plurality of proletarian resistances., etc etc. There is much in this that is creditable, however I would argue that Sergio neglects one point: that the importance of a level of political unity is not a historical product of the professional proletariat of the early 20th century, but rather supra-historical. Why? Because theory is not abstract- rather, it finds material articulation in our practice, and therefore striving for a level of agreement in theory is a necessary component of a meaningful, collective revolutionary praxis. This is not to imply any particular form by which this political unity might be realised, but simply to note that any new revolutionary practice cannot abandon attempts at theoretical unity and clarity (what might be termed 'centralism') for the warm waters of post-modern relativism.
The revolutionary left in Australia
This section is one of the most important, but I have run out of time to do it justice. The point of the above thoughts is that they have a critical bearing on the practice of the revolutionary left in Australia. For me a source of interest in Zizek's notion of the 'Leninist moment' is the way that it is so antithetical to the practice of much of the autonomist and anarchist left in Australia. They are prepared to take action on their own, but intervening into an existing struggle is generally seen as either a futile foray into reformist mass politics or as a violation of the autonomy of that movement. This reached its absurd height during last November's WTO protests, in which there were numerous artificially created 'blocks' who all guarded their autonomy very fiercely, but very few of which actually took their politics beyond their own immediate networks. The idea of 'organising where you are located', despite being a positive antidote to grandiose ISO organising drives that are far beyond the abilities of the organisation, seems to discourage the risk associated with intervening to change the existing state of affairs.
The lack of a Leninist impulse is nowhere more evident than in the history of Love and Rage as an organisation. In my limited experience of the group's last couple of years, what was crucially lacking was an understanding of how the organisation might act collectively to intervene into the struggles in which the membership were involved- precisely the challenge that has been discussed in this paper. Love and Rage's reluctance to provide political leadership in campaigns manifested not only in a lack of collective intervention, but also in a style of campaigning that aimed to unify people at the lowest possible level Ieg the Log of Claims campaigns). The need for this Leninist impulse was crucial to the disintegration of Love and Rage, with Sergio writing in his resignation letter (dated 27 Nov 2001), that 'to accept the inevitability of the leninist moment is to accept the need for political intervention.'
Who on the Australian left, then, is taking up Lenin's challenge of intervening, 'even if the situation was 'premature', with a wager that this very 'premature' intervention will radically change the 'objective' relationship of forces itself, within which the initial situation appeared as 'premature' '? Interestingly enough, the only group that comes to mind is Melbourne's autonomist-inspired No One is Illegal, who in initiating last year's Woomera action took a leap, unafraid of success, and won. Interestingly enough, NOII has been at times a kind of radical leadership or vanguard of the refugee movement, but their leadership has been in the form of 'leading by example' rather than the conventional Leninist sense. Thus it would appear that the idea of a 'Leninist moment', if not Leninism itself, continues to have relevance on the Australian left today.
Conclusions for practice
What conclusions can we draw from these reflections for the reconstruction of a revolutionary practice in Australia?
1- We need a revolutionary organisation of some kind to be the self-conscious collective subject capable of enacting the Leninist moment articulated by Zizek
2- This organisation cannot simply be a catch all or talk shop for revolutionaries, but rather must strive for a level of political unity, because theory is not abstract but rather something that finds material articulation through practice. This does not mean enforcing political homogeneity or much less a unanimity of campaign activity, but simply a recognition of the theory-practice nexus and the consequent need for continuous political debate and engagement to raise the level of theorisation and agreement.
3- For some time to come in Australia, it is not viable or desirable for any new revolutionary project to enforce unanimity in the practice of its participants. The fact that organisations like Socialist Alternative and the International Socialist Organisation 'centralise' their resources around the campaign of the week only demonstrate their deracination from any meaningful community of struggle. Our role in bringing together a new revolutionary movement in Australia must be to find people where they exist, and to unify them politically rather than enforcing a unanimity of practice. Note that this reverses the orthodox trotskyist notion of the united front (agreement on practical issues, disagreement on theoretical issues).
4- In order to learn from Lenin, we need to historicise his work- understand, for example, the way that the composition of the imperial Russian working class affected his conception of the party, or the way that the clandestine conditions of Tzarism limited the capacity for internal democracy in the party, or the way that Lenin's theory of imperialism was specific to a historical period that has long since passed. In doing this, we could do a lot worse than look to Tony Cliff, the founder of the International Socialist tendency, who in the 1950s developed a number of ingenious and highly innovative theories to bring trotskyism up to date and to develop a consistent understanding of the world- state capitalism, deflected permanent revolution, a materialist analysis of reformism, the permanent arms economy, socialism from below, etc. Whilst it may be claimed that he underwent his 'Leninist
moment' in the 1950s, unfortunately since then his new ideas, in the hands of Harman, Callinicos and numerous lesser lights, have fossilised into a series of universally applicable, de-historicised theories with no meaningful relationship to the real world.
5- We need to abandon the 'defend/ condemn Lenin and all his works' style of argument, in recognition that Lenin was a great revolutionary but that he also got things wrong, 'even monstrously so'. We need to develop a relationship with Lenin much like that we have with Lukács or Gramsci- for whom referring to them does not necessarily imply uncritical agreement on all points; quoting Gramsci does not make you a 'Gramsciist'
6- We need to abandon any justification for the party on the basis of a historically or teleologically ordained role. The party must be able to justify its existence with reference to the assistance it gives to today's struggles. Any other kind of justification is a sure sign of sectarianism. This is a difficult point to accept for most people in trotskyist organisations, since they have been trained either to justify their movement work in terms of the benefit it brings to the party (rather than the other way around as I am demanding), or alternatively (in the case of the ISO) they have been encouraged to become schizophrenics, drawing a dichotomy between the two separate, self-justifying spheres of 'party work' and 'movement work'.
J Matt Skellern
1
On using this quote I am struck by the gendered nature of my characterisation of Lenin and Luxemburg- Lenin the actor and creator in history, Luxemburg the passive companion-figure to the masses. I am not sure what to make of this, except to observe that everything being said about Lenin and Luxemburg at this point is more at the level of ideal-types than accurate historical figures.